Assassin’s Creed Odyssey last week had a full-screen pop-up advertisement that Ubisoft is blaming on an unidentified technical error. The pop-up, which appears as soon as you browse the map screen on the Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game, is reportedly visible to Reddit members.
A spokesman for Ubisoft, Fabien Darrigues, told The Verge in a statement.
“We’ve been informed that yesterday, while playing certain Assassin’s Creed titles, some players encountered pop-up ads.” “We fixed the technical error that caused this as soon as we became aware of the problem.”
Ubisoft hasn’t explained the technical error, but we can’t imagine the game suddenly became sentient and started adding its own Black Friday pop-up ads to promote Ubisoft’s latest versions of Assassin’s Creed. Someone at Ubisoft had to code this into the game specifically for the sale this week. We just don’t know if there were intentions to genuinely spread this out or if this was meant to be a little test that was mistakenly made public. In any case, as one Reddit user puts it, the idea behind inserting pop-ups in the middle of a paid game is quite gross.
New Fullscreen Xbox pop-up ads irritate customers
Xbox customers have been irritated by Microsoft’s recent usage of fullscreen Xbox pop-up advertisements to advertise its own games. Only when an Xbox is booted up do Microsoft’s advertisements show up, and not everyone appears to be seeing them. The pop-up advertisements from Microsoft and Ubisoft still differ greatly from the typical gaming console advertisements. Ads for video games have appeared on billboards before, such as in Saints Row 2 and other EA Games titles from the mid-to-late 2000s.
Good News and Bad News
The good news is that it has been resolved, so you shouldn’t have the same issue throughout your own Thanksgiving vacation. The bad news is that it’s highly improbable that anything similar wouldn’t be the product of a feature that was purposefully created and may have unintentionally leaked this week. Not to mention that this wasn’t an outdated asset rather, it was an advertisement for a specific Black Friday sale.
Microsoft and Sony might offer Low-price
It makes bleak logic that Ubisoft’s very expensive Ubisoft+ membership service and Microsoft’s and Sony’s ad-ridden Game Pass and PlayStation Plus would both have cheaper subscription options. Given that costs an eye-watering $15 a month for its more affordable way to play only Ubisoft games (as opposed to Game Pass, which charges the same but allows you to play all games), it would be incredibly reasonable for the publisher to try to attract more users by releasing an ad-supported version.
